The past decade has been marked by a technological revolution driven by the convergence of the data processing industry with the consumer electronics industry. The effect has, in turn, driven technologies which have been known and available but relatively quiescent over the years. A major one of these technologies is the Internet or Web (the terms are used interchangeably herein) related distribution of documents, programs, media and all other data processing entities. The convergence of the electronic entertainment and consumer industries with data processing exponentially accelerated the demand for wide ranging communication distribution channels and the Web or Internet, which had quietly existed for over a generation as a loose academic and government data distribution facility, reached “critical mass” and commenced a period of phenomenal expansion.
As a result of this expansion, extraordinary worldwide communication channels and resources have become available to businesses on a relatively inexpensive basis. This has commenced an era which will forever change how business processes are conducted. Business organizations including business enterprises (the term is used here to define organizations of such scope that many divisions and separate but interrelated companies are involved) are becoming increasingly modular in nature, i.e. with many shared processes and functions. This is, of course, greatly facilitated by the distribution and tracking functions provided by the Web.
Business entities must out source various functions or activities to other enterprise divisions, companies, partners and even contractor or subcontractor organizations. As a result of Internet functions and capabilities, these out source participants may be in different cities or countries.
However, this out sourcing or like collaboration between different organizations and companies requires the sharing of resources, such as business processes and databases. Each out sourcing company often has to make available to one or more of the others, databases, application programs and other resources that the others may need to complete their activity. This gives rise to the obvious need for up to literally hundreds of points of contact between business entities, dependent upon the size of the business enterprise or organization.
In addition, with the development of the Web, virtually all organizations have been driven to perform a substantial portion of their sales, marketing and customer distribution functions over the Web. These activities coupled with the above-described organizational functions have become known as e-Business, and their business organizations known as e-Business enterprises. To deliver value to their customers, companies of all sizes use partners: suppliers, complementary providers, distributors and shippers correlated through the Web.
Many companies and even large enterprises have responded to all of the above changes in the market place environment and needs on a piecemeal basis by adding resources and function as needed within each of their individual business entities or functions without any overall organization-wide overall plan. The business organizations wrestling with the complexities of plugging such individual resources and functions into the business organization or enterprise as needed are seeking information technology-centric protocols to solve many of these problems.